The post-human future

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Tue, 24 May 2005 00:22:32 -0700

 

 

The post-human future

by Melanie Phillips

 

Daily Mail, 23 May 2005

 

Once, we all said `Yuk'. Now, it seems, we are saying `Who could

possibly object?' What was abhorrent and grotesque yesterday is fast

becoming mandatory today.

 

A motor neurone disease victim, Bryan O'Regan, has volunteered some of

his skin cells to make a cloned embryo in the hope that cells from

such a clone can be used to develop a cure for MND after his death.

 

This follows the announcement last week by Korean scientists -- with

whom Mr O'Regan's doctors have teamed up -- that they have created

more than 30 cloned human embryos and dismantled them to grow the

world's first embryonic human stem cells which were an identical match

to those of patients with diabetes and spinal injuries. (Stem cells

are the body's master cells which can develop into any tissue and, in

theory, used toreplace diseased/damaged cells.)

 

Meanwhile, scientists at Newcastle university have created three human

clones, the most advanced being a five-day old female embryo — the

first cloned embryos to be created in Britain and, indeed, in the west.

 

These developments are being hailed as scientific breakthroughs which

hold out the hope of cures for a range of dreadful diseases. And of

course, it is entirely understandable that those who are suffering in

this way will desperately cling to anything which offers hope. But far

from enhancing our humanity, this scientific race threatens to destroy

it altogether.

 

There is a strong sense of unreality about all this. Earlier this

year, the United Nations voted in favour of banning all forms of human

cloning because of the insuperable ethical problems that it poses.

 

The British government is simply ignoring this unhelpful ruling. For

it has passed a law permitting what is euphemistically called

`therapeutic' cloning, which is said to be quite different from

`reproductive' cloning which it has banned.

 

This is because `therapeutic' cloning involves using cells from a

cloned embryo to grow tissue which can be implanted into a patient,

rather than allowing the cloned embryo to develop into a baby.

 

This is a highly disingenuous and meaningless distinction, since

'therapeutic' cloning still involves the creation of a human embryo

which, if it were left alone — all other things being scientifically

equal — would grow into a baby.

 

The cloners and their Whitehall patrons, however, claim that this

isn't reproductive cloning because the cloned embryo will be killed

before it gets anywhere near becoming a baby. Look, they say, it will

be no bigger than the dot at the end of this sentence: not an unborn

baby, but a bundle of cells which can only be seen under a microscope.

 

In making such a claim, however, they give their essentially

dehumanising game away. For they are redefining human reproduction as

only a process which produces a breathing baby at the end of it.

 

On this reasoning, it follows that an unborn child is no longer part

of the human reproductive process. That's why they do not regard a

five-day old embryo as a human life but merely a collection of cells

to be pulled apart and then flushed away like a soapsud.

 

This displays a profound disrespect for early life, which is all the

more dangerous because the cloners and their backers refuse to

acknowledge that what they are creating is human life at all. That is

because all they can see is the noble purpose for which they are

creating it, to relieve the suffering of others.

 

But instrumentalising life in this way, bringing an individual into

being solely to benefit other individuals, is utterly inimical to the

deepest belief of our civilisation that every human life deserves

equal dignity and respect.

 

Yes, we have greatly eroded that belief over the years, particularly

by our promiscuous use of abortion. But `therapeutic' cloning is worse

than abortion, and even worse than the destruction of `spare' embryos

created through in-vitro fertilisation. For it means deliberately

creating a life solely in order to destroy it.

 

In addition, who can doubt that `therapeutic' cloning is a step on an

already lethal slippery slope? How many times have we heard the

government or the medical experimentation lobby swear with hands on

their hearts that this or that `essential' development — abortion,

artificial insemination by donor, experimentation on embryos — is

hemmed in by an iron legislative wall to prevent us from slithering

into an ethical nightmare?

 

Yet every single such development has opened the door to increasingly

indefensible practices that have degraded and coarsened our society.

Once human embryos are created, the pressure to do more with them at

later stages of gestation will inevitably increase, and eventually the

pressure to allow some of them to develop into babies will become

irresistible.

 

All, of course, from the highest of motives. We are told that human

cloning is necessary to alleviate human suffering. Yet this is nothing

less than emotional blackmail. First, it is far from clear whether

cloning will actually cure any diseases. Formidable difficulties

remain, not least in ensuring that the disease to be alleviated is

screened out from the implanted cloned tissue.

 

Moreover, considerable success is already being achieved by using stem

cells drawn from the bodies of children and adults. The race to clone

embryos surely derives from a different agenda altogether — to put

Britain in the forefront of scientific discovery. This serves the

interests of scientists looking to win empires and Nobel prizes, and

of a government keen to cash in on the resulting economic bonanza and

Britain's `standing' in the world.

 

Britain might indeed achieve distinctive standing on this issue — but

as a pariah. For the reason it has become a magnet for those wanting

to do this work is because much of the world rightly regards it as

unethical and dangerous.

 

It is no accident that the UK is in the forefront of the cloning race

in the west. For this country has become a major exporter of

consumer-driven self-centredness. It is the pioneer post-moral

society, where religion has disintegrated faster than anywhere else on

the planet.

 

The collapse of the religious sense of the sacred has reduced the

definition of personhood to no more than a chemical soup of body

parts, sensory activity and DNA.

 

British scientists therefore think the only legitimate objection to

cloning is that it may be unsafe. Anyone who thinks in terms of right

or wrong is regarded as a religious nutcase.

 

Thus science has junked ethics altogether, and any intrinsic respect

for life has vanished. All that matters instead is the brutal

utilitarian doctrine which is now our state religion: serving the

happiness of the greatest number.

 

Cloning is but the latest stage of a softening-up process which has

been going on for years. IVF, embryo experimentation and surrogacy

have made us accept that sperm is to be banked and eggs to be

harvested regardless of origin or destination.

 

The links between sex, procreation, and parenthood have progressively

been snapped while we have stripped unborn life of meaning and

respect. As the American bio-ethicist Leon Kass has written, the clone

is the ideal emblem of this society — the ultimate single-parent child.

 

Just like previous developments, the arguments for cloning are couched

in the most noble terms. So we will surely be led inexorably to clone

live human babies, all to produce a more advanced world free from

disease, infertility or unappealing characteristics.

 

It is a Faustian pact which shifts us straight from altruism to

eugenics, bargaining away our humanity for the chimera of a world

without pain. `Therapeutic' cloning may look like progress, but it

will only lead us from our disturbing post-moral present to an

altogether more chilling post-human future.

 

 

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